Briefly explain how each set of theorists understands the fundamental social problem created by modern capitalist industrialization. How does each set of theorists hope we will remedy this fundamental problem?
Prompt: Marx/Engels (M/E) and Durkheim (D) recognized the many significant social problems that emerged in the transition from agricultural to modern capitalist industrialized societies. These theorists, however, draw very different conclusions about the stability of industrial society and the future of capitalism. In this essay, briefly explain how each set of theorists understands the fundamental social problem created by modern capitalist industrialization. How does each set of theorists hope we will remedy this fundamental problem? Do these theoretical insights still have contemporary relevance? Choose one concrete, contemporary social problem for theoretical analysis. How might Marx/Engels or Durkheim explain this problem? Whose insights do you think best explain your chosen problem? Why?
First Hint: In sociology, we expect essays to have a major organizing argument. Begin by addressing the social disruptions of capitalist industrialization. Then, briefly address the last question, i.e., make the case that the analytical tools of Marx/Engels or Durkheim still help us understand concrete problems of social inequality (M/E) or social solidarity (D). For example, an issue like homelessness could be analyzed from either perspective. The work/pay conditions of Amazon warehouse workers would be a good example of the ongoing relevance of M/E in explaining the dynamics of capitalist exploitation. Issues of race/gender discrimination could be addressed by D as failures of social integration.
Second Hint: When explaining the insights of that one theorist might shed on your chosen problem, briefly explain where the other theorist falls short. In other words, the case for X being more insightful than Y is stronger when the shortcomings of Y are briefly pointed out.
Submission Guidelines: Your essay should be about 1400 words in length (+/- 100 words). Include your final word count in the top left side of your first page. You may upload a Word or PDF document to the Assignments section on b-course. This essay is due by 11:59 pm, Monday, September 26.
You do not need to attach a “Works Cited” page unless you use material not assigned in this class. Since much of your grade is based on evidence of learning course material, I recommend not using external sources. Concentrate instead on the class readings. When citing material, it is better to refer to the writings by Marx/Engels and Durkheim directly rather than my Powerpoints.
Please note that “Turnitin” has been activated for this assignment. Turnitin is a tool that looks for any unquoted sections of your essay that may have been copied from other student papers, scholarly books and articles, and/or internet database sources. Make sure you express your ideas in your own words. When you use quotes or key ideas, make sure you cite your sources. Failure to do so can be used as evidence of plagiarism or cheating, an action that could lead to a failing grade on this paper and requires me to make a report to the Student Conduct committee. Your Turnitin score should be well under 10%.
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Requirements: How ever long it says to be in the instuctions and no longer.
Engels, Friedrich. 1844. Excerpts from “The Great Towns” in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
Background and Reading Guide to “The Great Towns” (Friedrich Engels)
Karl Marx (1820-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1818-1895)–German philosophers who wrote in-depth analyses and critiques of early industrial capitalism, (i.e., an economic system where the means of production are privately owned and production is oriented toward profit). Marx and Engels were horrified by the poverty, degradation, and suffering created by the unequal division of wealth created by industrialization. While they saw the potential of industrial society to create sufficient wealth for all, they argued that modern, industrial capitalism was dividing society into two classes, one extremely rich and one extremely poor. They predicted that as more people became factory workers, workers would unite and demand a better society. Class struggle and economic crises would both act to undermine capitalism and create a new society where goods and resources were shared (socialism/communism). Under socialism, the means of production would be owned by all, factories would be cooperatively run by the workers, and production would be geared to meeting human needs rather than generating profits for the very few.
1. What were living conditions like in the working quarters of London?
2. What did Engels mean by the term “social murder”?
3. Why does Engels believe that “a willingness to work” (i.e., a work ethic) is not sufficient
to keep people out of poverty?
4. What are living conditions like in the slums described by Engels?
5. Who benefitted from the rents people payed to live in these quarters?
6. What were the conditions of the 3 families whom Engels describes on p. 5?
7. Are living conditions any different for the working poor in Manchester?
8. How was it possible for the rich industrialists (the people who owned the factories) to
ignore these living conditions?
9. Why do you think Engels so upset by the social inequality created by early industrial
capitalism?
Selections from Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns”
[Friedrich Engels was Karl Marx’s colleague. Together they wrote many significant critiques of capitalism. This selection is taken from Friedrich Engels’ early writings (he had not yet met Marx). It has become a classic historical description of life among industrial workers in the British Isles. Engels was the son of a German manufacturer. He was sent to Manchester, England in 1842 to learn the family business. Engels spent much of his time, however, walking through the slums of the cities he visited, closely observing the living and working conditions of the proletariat (the working class). His observations became the basis of a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. The excerpts below are taken from the chapter, “The Great Towns.”
–Prof. K.]
A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralisation, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point . . . has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames. I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, . . . the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s greatness before he sets foot upon English soil.
But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.
Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. . . . . [P]eople regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot; and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.
What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together.
Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive manner. During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. Let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. The bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation. But indirectly, far more than directly, many have died of starvation, where long-continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained inoperative brought on severe illness and death. The English working men call this “social murder”, and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong?
True, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the working man that it may not be his turn tomorrow? Who assures him employment, who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his lord and master discharges him tomorrow, he can struggle along with those dependent upon him, until he may find some one else “to give him bread”? Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something today and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something tomorrow. He knows that every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his head above water. He knows that, though he may have the means of living today, it is very uncertain whether he shall tomorrow.
Meanwhile, let us proceed to a more detailed investigation of the position in which the social war has placed the non-possessing class. Let us see what pay for his work society does give the working-man in the form of dwelling, clothing, food, what sort of subsistence it grants those who contribute most to the maintenance of society; and, first, let us consider the dwellings.
Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one- or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and a kitchens form . . . the general dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working men’s quarters may readily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with wet clothing.
Let us investigate some of the slums. London comes first, and in London the famous rookery of St. Giles. . . is in the midst of the most populous part of the town, surrounded by broad, splendid avenues in which the gay world of London idles about, in the immediate neighbourhood of Oxford Street, Regent Street, of Trafalgar Square and the Strand. It is a disorderly collection of tall, three- or four-storied houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except that, here, people of the working-class only are to be seen. A vegetable market is held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and hardly fit to use obstruct the sidewalk still further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers’ stalls, arises a horrible smell. The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in this thieves’ quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.
Nor is St. Giles the only London slum. In the immense tangle of streets, there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined with houses too bad for anyone to live in, who can still spend anything whatsoever upon a dwelling fit for human beings. Close to the splendid houses of the rich such a lurking-place of the bitterest poverty may often be found. So, a short time ago, on the occasion of a coroner’s inquest, a region close to Portman Square, one of the very respectable squares, was characterised as an abode “of a multitude of Irish demoralised by poverty and filth”. So, too, may be found in streets, such as Long Acre and others . . . a great number of cellar dwellings out of which puny children and half-starved, ragged women emerge into the light of day. In the immediate neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre . . . are some of the worst streets of the whole metropolis . . . in which the houses are inhabited from cellar to garret exclusively by poor families. In the parishes of St. John and St. Margaret there lived in 1840, according to the Journal of the Statistical Society, 5,566 working-men’s families in 5,294 “dwellings” (if they deserve the name!), men, women, and children thrown together without distinction of age or sex, 26,850 persons all told; and of these families three-fourths possessed but one room. In the aristocratic parish of St. George, Hanover Square, there lived, according to the same authority, 1,465 working-men’s families, nearly 6,000 persons, under similar conditions, and here, too, more than two-thirds of the whole number crowded together at the rate of one family in one room. And how the poverty of these unfortunates, among whom even thieves find nothing to steal, is exploited by the property-holding class in lawful ways! The abominable dwellings in Drury Lane, just mentioned, bring in the following rents: two cellar dwellings, 3s., one room, ground-floor, 4s.; second-storey, 4s. 6d.; third-floor, 4s.; garret-room, 3s. weekly, so that the starving occupants of Charles Street alone, pay the house-owners a yearly tribute of £2,000, and the 5,566 families above mentioned in Westminster, a yearly rent of £40,000.
The most extensive working-people’s district lies east of the Tower in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, where the greatest masses of London working-people live. Let us hear Mr. G. Alston, preacher of St. Philip’s, Bethnal Green, on the condition of his parish. He says:
It contains 1,400 houses, inhabited by 2,795 families, comprising a population of 12,000. The space within which this large amount of population are living is less than 400 yards square (1,200 feet), and it is no uncommon thing for a man and his wife, with four or five children, and sometimes the grandfather and grandmother, to be found living in a room from ten to twelve feet square, and which serves them for eating and working in. I believe that till the Bishop of London called the attention of the public to the state of Bethnal Green, about as little was known at the West-end of the town of this most destitute parish as the wilds of Australia or the islands of the South Seas. If we really desire to find out the most destitute and deserving, we must lift the latch of their doors, and find them at their scanty meal; we must see them when suffering from sickness and want of work; and if we do this from day to day in such a neighbourhood as Bethnal Green, we shall become acquainted with a mass of wretchedness and misery such as a nation like our own ought to be ashamed to permit. I was Curate of a parish near Huddersfield during the three years of the greatest manufacturing distress; but I never witnessed such a thorough prostration of the poor as I have seen since I have been in Bethnal Green. There is not one father of a family in ten throughout the entire district that possesses any clothes but his working dress, and that too commonly in the worst tattered condition; and with many this wretched clothing forms their only covering at night, with nothing better than a bag of straw or shavings to lie upon.
The foregoing description furnishes an idea of the aspect of the interior of the dwellings. But let us follow the English officials, who occasionally stray thither, into one or two of these working men’s homes.
On the occasion of an inquest held Nov. 16th, 1843, by Mr. Carter, coroner for Surrey, upon the body of Ann Galway, aged 45 years, the newspapers related the following particulars concerning the deceased: She had lived at No. 5 White Lion Court, Bermondsey Street, London, with her husband and a nineteen- year-old son in a little room, in which neither a bedstead nor any other furniture was to be seen. She lay dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over her almost naked body, there being neither sheet nor coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the physician could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed, and then found it starved and scarred from the bites of vermin. Part of the floor of the room was torn up, and the hole used by the family as a privy.
On Monday, Jan. 15th, 1844, two boys were brought before the police magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and immediately devoured a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop. The magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received the following details from the policeman: The mother of the two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time since the death of her husband, to provide for her nine children. She lived at No. 2 Pool’s Place, Quaker Court, Spitalfields, in the utmost poverty. When the policeman came to her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup, and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s apron, which served the whole family as a bed. For bed clothing they had only their scanty day clothing. The poor woman told him that she had been forced to sell her bedstead the year before to buy food. Her bedding she had pawned with the victualler for food. In short, everything had gone for food. The magistrate ordered the woman a considerable provision from the poor-box.
In February, 1844, Theresa Bishop, a widow 60 years old, was recommended, with her sick daughter, aged 26, to the compassion of the police magistrate in Marlborough Street. She lived at No. 5 Brown Street, Grosvenor Square, in a small back room no larger than a closet, in which there was not one single piece of furniture. In one corner lay some rags upon which both slept; a chest served as table and chair. The mother earned a little by charring. The owner of the house said that they had lived in this way since May 1843, had gradually sold or pawned everything that they had, and had still never paid any rent. The magistrate assigned them £1 from the poor-box.
I am far from asserting that all London working-people live in such want as the foregoing three families. I know very well that ten are somewhat better off, where one is so totally trodden under foot by society; but I assert that thousands of industrious and worthy people — far worthier and more to be respected than the rich of London — do find themselves in a condition unworthy of human beings; and that every proletarian, everyone, without exception, is exposed to a similar fate without any fault of his own and in spite of every possible effort.
But in spite of all this, they who have some kind of a shelter are fortunate, fortunate in comparison with the utterly homeless. In London fifty thousand human beings get up every morning, not knowing where they are to lay their heads at night. The luckiest of this multitude, those who succeed in keeping a penny or two until evening, enter a lodging-house, such as abound in every great city, where they find a bed. But what a bed! These houses are filled with beds from cellar to garret, four, five, six beds in a room; as many as can be crowded in. Into every bed four, five, or six human beings are piled, as many as can be packed in, sick and well, young and old, drunk and sober, men and women, just as they come, indiscriminately. Then come strife, blows, wounds, or, if these bedfellows agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged and things done which our language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses to record. And those who cannot pay for such a refuge? They sleep where they find a place, in passages, arcades, in corners where the police and the owners leave them undisturbed. A few individuals find their way to the refuges which are managed, here and there, by private charity, others sleep on the benches in the parks close under the windows of Queen Victoria. Let us hear the London Times:
It appears from the report of the proceedings at Marlborough Street Police Court in our columns of yesterday, that there is an average number of 50 human beings of all ages, who huddle together in the parks every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by the trees and a few hollows of the embankment. Of these, the majority are young girls who have been seduced from the country by the soldiers and turned loose on the world in all the destitution of friendless penury, and all the recklessness of early vice.
This is truly horrible! Poor there must be everywhere. Indigence will find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great and luxurious city. Amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets of a populous metropolis there must always, we fear, be much suffering — much that offends the eye — much that lurks unseen.
But that within the precincts of wealth, gaiety, and fashion, nigh the regal grandeur of St. James. close on the palatial splendour of Bayswater, on the confines of the old and new aristocratic quarters, in a district where the cautious refinement of modern design has refrained from creating one single tenement for poverty; which seems, as it were, dedicated to the exclusive enjoyment of wealth.
It is indeed a monstrous state of things! Enjoyment the most absolute, that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the more innocent pleasures of sense can supply to man’s craving, brought in close contact with the most unmitigated misery! Wealth, from its bright saloons, laughing — an insolently heedless laugh — at the unknown wounds of want! Pleasure, cruelly but unconsciously mocking the pain that moans below! All contrary things mocking one another — all contrary, save the vice which tempts and the vice which is tempted!
But let all men remember this — that within the most courtly precincts of the richest city of God’s earth, there may be found, night after night, winter after winter, women — young in years — old in sin and suffering — outcasts from society — ROTTING FROM FAMINE, FILTH, AND DISEASE. Let them remember this, and learn not to theorise but to act. God knows, there is much room for action nowadays.
II (Manchester)
If we cross Blackstone Edge or penetrate it with the railroad, we enter upon that classic soil on which English manufacture has achieved its masterwork and from which all labour movements emanate, namely, South Lancashire with its central city Manchester. Again we have beautiful hill country, sloping gently from the watershed westwards towards the Irish Sea, with the charming green valleys of the Ribble, the Irwell, the Mersey, and their tributaries, a country which, a hundred years ago chiefly swamp land, thinly populated, is now sown with towns and villages, and is the most densely populated strip of country in England. In Lancashire, and especially in Manchester, English manufacture finds at once its starting-point and its centre. The Manchester Exchange is the thermometer for all the fluctuations of trade. The modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester. In the cotton industry of South Lancashire, the application of the forces of Nature, the superseding of hand-labour by machinery (especially by the power-loom and the self-acting mule), and the division of labour, are seen at the highest point; and, if we recognise in these three elements that which is characteristic of modern manufacture, we must confess that the cotton industry has remained in advance of all other branches of industry from the beginning down to the present day. The effects of modern manufacture upon the working-class must necessarily develop here most freely and perfectly, and the manufacturing proletariat present itself in its fullest classic perfection. The degradation to which the application of steam-power, machinery and the division of labour reduce the working-man, and the attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement, must likewise be carried to the highest point and with the fullest consciousness. Hence because Manchester is the classic type of a modern manufacturing town, and because I know it as intimately as my own native town, more intimately than most of its residents know it, we shall make a longer stay here. . . .
Manchester proper lies on the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two smaller ones, the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell. . . . The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people’s quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people’s quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle- class; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity. Manchester contains, at its heart, a rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses. . . . With the exception of this commercial district, all Manchester proper. . . . are . . . unmixed working-people’s quarters, stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around the commercial district. Outside, beyond this girdle, lives the upper and middle bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid out streets in the vicinity of the working quarters . . . ; the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas with gardens in free, wholesome country air, in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by omnibuses going into the city. And the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly external appearance and can care for it. True, these shops bear some relation to the districts which lie behind them, and are more elegant in the commercial and residential quarters than when they hide grimy working-men’s dwellings; but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth. . . .
I proceed now to describe the labouring quarters. First of all, there is the Old Town of Manchester, which lies between the northern boundary of the commercial district and the Irk. Here the streets, even the better ones, are narrow and winding, . . . the houses dirty, old, and tumble-down, and the construction of the side streets utterly horrible. Going from the Old Church to Long Millgate, the stroller has at once a row of old-fashioned houses at the right, of which not one has kept its original level; these are remnants of the old pre-manufacturing Manchester, whose former inhabitants have removed with their descendants into better-built districts, and have left the houses, which were not good enough for them, to a population strongly mixed with Irish blood. Here one is in an almost undisguised working-men’s quarter, for even the shops and beerhouses hardly take the trouble to exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness. But all this is nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which access can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human beings can pass at the same time. Of the irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan, of the tangle in which they are crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey an idea. And it is not the buildings surviving from the old times of Manchester which are to blame for this; the confusion has only recently reached its height when every scrap of space left by the old way of building has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land is left to be further occupied. . . .
The south bank of the Irk is here very steep and between fifteen and thirty feet high. On this declivitous hillside there are planted three rows of houses, of which the lowest rise directly out of the river, while the front walls of the highest stand on the crest of the hill in Long Millgate. Among them are mills on the river, in short, the method of construction is as crowded and disorderly here as in the lower part of Long Millgate. Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found — especially in the courts which lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. . . . Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge the only entrance to most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth. The first court below Ducie Bridge . . . was in such a state at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime. . . . Since then, it seems to have been partially torn away and rebuilt . . . . The view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature by a parapet as high as a man, is characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. But besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. Below the bridge you look upon the piles of débris, the refuse, filth, and offal from the courts on the steep left bank; here each house is packed close behind its neighbour and a piece of each is visible, all black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window-frames. The background is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings. On the lower right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being a ruin without a roof, piled with débris; the third stands so low that the lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors. Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the “Poor-Law Bastille” of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people’s quarter below.
Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both bank grows worse rather than better. He who turns to the left here from the main street, Long Millgate, is lost; he wanders from one court to another, turns countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys, until after a few minutes he has lost all clue, and knows not whither to turn. Everywhere half or wholly ruined buildings, some of them actually uninhabited, which means a great deal here; rarely a wooden or stone floor to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly broken, ill-fitting windows and doors, and a state of filth! Everywhere heaps of débris, refuse, and offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench which alone would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilised to live in such a district. The newly built extension of the Leeds railway, which crosses the Irk here, has swept away some of these courts and lanes, laying others completely open to view. Immediately under the railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which surpass all the others by far, just because it was hitherto so shut off, so secluded that the way to it could not be found without a good deal of trouble, I should never have discovered it myself, without the breaks made by the railway, though I thought I knew this whole region thoroughly. Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and sleeping-room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I found two beds — and such bedsteads and beds! — which, with a staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled the room. In several others I found absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned against it. Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet. This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the third by the river, and besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow doorway alone led out into another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept labyrinth of dwellings.
Enough! The whole side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings. And how could the people be clean with no proper opportunity for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants? Privies are so rare here that they are either filled up every day, or are too remote for most of the inhabitants to use. How can people wash when they have only the dirty Irk water at hand, while pumps and water pipes can be found in decent parts of the city alone? In truth, it cannot be charged to the account of these helots of modern society if their dwellings are not more clean than the pig-sties which are here and there to be seen among them. The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six or seven cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge, the floors of which stand at least two feet below the low-water level of the Irk that flows not six feet away from them; or like the upper floor of the corner-house on the opposite shore directly above the bridge, where the ground-floor, utterly uninhabitable, stands deprived of all fittings for doors and windows, a case by no means rare in this region, when this open ground-floor is used as a privy by the whole neighbourhood for want of other facilities!
. . . Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air — and such air! — he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the Old Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but what does that prove?
Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. The couple of hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long since abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between these old houses to win a covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the agricultural districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattle sheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich. In the industrial epoch alone has it become possible that the worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere material, a mere chattel; that he must let himself be crowded into a dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys the right to let go utterly to ruin. This manufacture has achieved, which, without these workers, this poverty, this slavery could not have lived.
Kelsey, Mary. 2019. “Comments on the writings of Emile Durkheim: Excerpts from
The Division of Labour.” Unpublished.
Reading Guide to The Division of Labour in Society (Emile Durkheim)
Basic vocabulary:
social solidarity: specifically mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity
specialization and interdependence
social justice and legitimate (vs. illegitimate) inequality
1. Be able to explain the major differences between mechanical and organic solidarity. What
type of economy was associated with each type of social solidarity? What was the underlying
principal (i.e., the “social glue”) that held each type of society together? Why type of laws
were associated with each type of social solidarity?
2. What social benefits did Durkheim think could grow out of industrial development? Did Durkheim believe that organic solidarity would “naturally” occur?
3. How did Durkheim think we might increase our awareness of our social interdependence?
4. How did Durkheim propose to reform existing capitalist industrial societies to reduce
inequalities to a level generally perceived as fair, (i.e., the result of “legitimate inequality”)?
5. What role would education play in the development of organic solidarity?
6. How did Durkheim define “morality”? What is the source of morality for Durkheim
7. (Question for thought) Would Durkheim’s reforms be easy to achieve?
(More questions for thought) Durkheim essentially argued that a good and stable society must have sufficient social integration and moral regulation. What would these concepts look like in practice? What do you think of his vision of society?
Comments on Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society
Mary E. Kelsey, Ph.D.
(revised August 2019)
The Division of Labour in Society, written in 1893, was Durkheim’s doctoral dissertation. The book was written during the “golden age of socialism,” (i.e., 1890-1914) when socialist political parties had strong popular support in Europe. Many, but by no means all, academics of the time adopted socialist perspectives in their writing and research. While not socialist himself, Durkheim’s work was in silent dialogue with the socialist intellectuals of his day. This dialogue is particularly evident in The Division of Labour in Society. As seen in our readings from Marx and Engels, the socialists were in awe of the sheer volume of goods that could be created by industrialization, but decried the uneven distribution of industrial wealth. Durkheim also believed that unfair distribution of wealth created unnecessary social problems, but he framed the problem of injustice in slightly different terms. As we saw in the readings on suicide, Durkheim had a deep concern for social integration (or solidarity—the term he uses in The Division of Labour in Society) as well as a deep concern for morality. In The Division of Labour in Society, the interdependence between social solidarity and morality is explored, particularly in the concluding chapters of the book—the section from which the following reading comes.
In The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim makes the overarching argument that social solidarity takes different forms depending on the way a society produces its goods. Agricultural societies achieved social integration through “mechanical solidarity” where similarity was the primary cohesive force among individuals. In Europe, agricultural societies had a relatively simple class system based on land ownership. A few people (the aristocracy—or in Durkheim’s terms, “the patricians”) owned the land. Most people (the “plebeians” in Durkheim’s terms) worked the land as peasants—and supported the aristocracy with the fruits of their labor. The powerful institution of the Church regulated the moral behavior of individuals and everyone shared a common set of moral values.
The division of labor (or how people decide who does what work) in agricultural societies was relatively simple and limited to a few basic jobs, (e.g., farmers, craftspeople, merchants, religious and military personnel). The children of farmers would become farmers, the sons of craftsmen would become craftsmen. Military or religious organizations occasionally offered an alternative career, but the majority of people simply carried on as farmers. The life of one person was very much like the life of the next. Durkheim argued that the similarity of people’s lives made it easier for them to identify with each other, strengthening the intensity of their social solidarity. Yet, the relatively simple division of labor characterizing agricultural societies gave individuals few opportunities to change the destinies of their births and to develop their innate and unique talents.
Durkheim argued that industrial societies could achieve a new and better form of social integration—at least under certain conditions. Durkheim’s term for social cohesion in industrial societies was “organic solidarity.” Durkheim chose this phrase to capture the more complex relationship among the parts of living organisms versus the simple interdependence of machine components. Writing after the completion of the Industrial Revolution, Durkheim saw many advantages to industrialization, including elevated standards of living within industrialized nations of Western Europe and the United States. Because factories reorganized the division of labor—giving each worker one piece of the total job—the time and expense of production per unit dropped. Things that had once been produced by hand and were only available at great cost, became abundant and less expensive.
Not only did industrialization allow for more efficient production of goods, the number and kinds of jobs required by industrial societies also increased. While the children of farmers might learn agricultural methods from their parents, the children of industrial workers would need specialized knowledge—most easily learned in schools—to perform specialized tasks. Given the wider array of career choices, children would need good schools to discover and develop their talents. Adults would have more opportunities to find jobs that matched their interests. But, the life of one individual could be very different from the life of the next—and these differences could make it harder for individuals to feel a sense of solidarity for others within their society.
Thus, the overarching question in The Division of Labour asks how industrial societies might develop the “organic solidarity” needed for social cohesion. Durkheim argued that the moral influence of religion in agricultural societies, had once “extended to everything; everything social was religious” (Durkheim 1984:119). But, the rise of other powerful institutions in modern industrial society gradually eroded the moral hold of religion. “[P]olitical, economic and scientific functions broke free from the religious function, . . . [diminishing the] number of beliefs and collective sentiments that [were] both sufficiently collective and strong enough to assume a religious character” (p. 119).
Durkheim answers this question by asserting that society itself, through the division of labor, creates the interdependence that is the foundation of social solidarity. In order to understand how we create the social foundation for solidarity, it is helpful to look at Durkheim’s understanding of education. In an essay from Education and Sociology (1956 ), Durkheim asserts that schools have two primary functions. One goal is to help individual students discover and develop their unique talents in preparation for entry into the labor market. The second goal is to instill a shared sense of the society to which we belong and to a set of common moral values.
In the course of our history, there has been established a whole set of ideas on human nature . . . on right and duty, on society, on the individual, on progress, on science, on art, etc., which are the basis of our national spirit; all education, that of the rich as well as that of the poor, that which leads to professional careers as well as that which prepares for industrial functions, has as its object to fix [this set of ideas] in our minds. (p. 70)
For Durkheim, the knowledge of our shared history, moral beliefs, and traditions forms the “social being” within the child by inculcating “the essential similarities that collective life demands” (p.70).
However, if education is to achieve its goals of instilling a shared set of values and developing a diverse range of talents, it can only do so if the institution is an integral part of a society committed to social justice. In fact, impediments to social justice impeded the full flowering of the division of labor.
Durkheim was well aware that old social prejudices and inherited wealth could block certain children from getting the educations they deserved. These same prejudices and unfair advantages could also block certain adults from getting the jobs that best suited their aptitudes and skills. If equality of opportunity were blocked by old class privileges, the division of labor would not progress efficiently. Less talented but wealthier people might take the “better” jobs. Moreover, talented people in lesser positions would resent the social constraints that confined them to their lower social status. In order to increase access to opportunity, Durkheim proposed that we rid ourselves of social prejudices and, more radically, that we eliminate the inheritance of wealth. Only under conditions of fair competition within a level playing field, would children get the education they deserved and workers would find the jobs that best suited their talents. In a just society, the most talented people would perform the most important jobs.
If a society could solve the problem of how to place individuals in jobs that made best use of their talents, the economy would become more efficient. People would also feel more committed to their larger society if they had interesting jobs that granted opportunities to develop their talents. Thus, social justice in the division of labor would not only increase the wealth of society, but also increase the overall sense of social solidarity.
If opportunities for education and access to jobs were open to all, Durkheim proposed that people who did the most important jobs (a concept he left undefined) should receive higher pay. Because everyone had the same opportunities to develop their talents, these (relatively small) differences in rewards would be seen as a form of “legitimate inequality.” But, if society did not allow for equality of education and opportunity, individuals excluded from these resources/opportunities, would resent those in power and work to overturn the status quo. Under these conditions, (i.e., in societies that restricted education and career mobility), social control of the population could only be maintained through coercion and violence. Thus, industrial societies must become fairer in order to foster a sense of interdependence and solidarity.
As we saw in Suicide, The Division of Labour in Society develops Durkheim’s underlying belief that morality must be the central governing force in the actions of societies and individuals. Indeed, Durkheim essentially defined “society” as the (only) force strong enough to impose moral behavior on its members. For Durkheim, without morality, there could be no “society.” And, without society, there is insufficient moral energy to constrain individual behavior. Durkheim’s notion of morality, therefore, was not limited to the behavior of individuals toward each other, but encompassed the obligations of society to its individual members. If social arrangements were not perceived as “just”, individuals would have little motivation to accept the yoke of socially-imposed, moral restraint.
In The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim was hopeful that France and other industrial societies were developing stronger forms of organic solidarity. As a firm believer in “social facts,” Durkheim argued that we could measure a society’s progress toward organic solidarity by looking at the character of its laws. Durkheim contended that societies characterized by mechanical solidarity had a preponderance of punitive laws. But, as societies became more complex through industrial development, the degree of organic solidarity would be expressed by an increase in restitutory laws, (e.g., civil law, economic law). Rather than punish wrongdoers, restitutory law would demand that the damage inflicted upon the injured party be repaired as much as possible. If organic solidarity developed as it should, the number of coercive laws and practices would shrink as restitutory laws became the basis of society’s legal codes.
Unlike the socialists of his day, Durkheim did not advocate public (state) ownership of the means of production, (i.e., factories and other economic entities). But, he did see the need for students of society, (e.g., people with “social facts” like sociologists), to influence the political actions of the government. For Durkheim, a just society is one that has shed old prejudices, abolished inherited wealth, and provided an excellent education for all. A government led by the wealthy would be a government without a strong moral core and without a commitment to advance the cause of social justice. Any political leadership that did not acknowledge our need for one another (our fundamental interdependence) would thus undermine the very foundation needed for the progression of the division of labor.
Emile Durkheim
Excerpts from “The Forced Division of Labour” (pp. 310-22) and “Conclusion” (pp. 329-41) in The Division of Labor in Society. 1984 [1893] Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press.
It is not enough for social rules to exist, for occasionally it is these very rules that are the cause of evil. This is what happens in the class war. The institution of classes or castes constitutes one organisation of the division of labour, one that is closely regulated. Yet it is often a source of dissension. Since the lower classes are not, or no longer are, satisfied with the role that has fallen to them by custom or law, they aspire to functions that are prohibited to them and seek to dispossess those who exercise them. We are not predestined from birth to any particular form of employment, but we nevertheless possess tastes and aptitudes that limit our choice. If no account is taken of them, if they are constantly frustrated in our daily occupation, we suffer, and seek the means of bringing that suffering to an end. There is no solution other than to change the established order and create a new one. For the division of labour to engender solidarity, it is thus not sufficient for everyone to have his task: it must also be agreeable to him.
This condition is not realised in our current society. Indeed, if the institution of class sometimes gives rise to miserable squabbling instead of producing solidarity, it is because the distribution of social functions on which it rests does not correspond, or rather no longer corresponds, to the distribution of natural abilities. When the plebeians [common people] began to dispute with the patricians [the upper class] the honour of performing religious and administrative functions, it was not merely to imitate them, but it was because the plebeians had become more intelligent, more wealthy, and more numerous, and their tastes and ambitions had in consequence been modified. Through these transformations the congruence in a whole sector of society was broken between the aptitudes of individuals and the kind of activity allocated to them. Constraint alone, more or less violent, more or less direct, henceforth binds them to these functions. In consequence, only an imperfect troubled form of solidarity can exist.
Such an outcome is not a necessary sequel to the division of labour. It only occurs when it is the result of some external constraint. Matters are very different when it is established through some purely internal and spontaneous action, without anything arising to hinder individual initiatives. On this condition, in fact, a harmony between individual natures and social functions cannot fail to occur, at least over the average number of cases. If nothing hampers or favours unduly rivals who are disputing the tasks they perform, inevitably only those most fitted for each type of activity will succeed in obtaining it. The sole cause then determining how labour is divided up is the diversity of abilities. In the nature of things this allocation is made according to aptitude, since there is no reason for it to happen otherwise. Thus a harmony is automatically realised between the constitution of each individual and his condition.
We may therefore state that the division of labour only produces solidarity if it is spontaneous, and to the degree that it is spontaneous. But spontaneity must mean not simply the absence of any deliberate, formal type of violence, but of anything that may hamper, even indirectly, the free unfolding of the social force each individual contains within himself. In short, labour only divides up spontaneously if society is constituted in such a way that social inequalities express precisely natural inequalities. Perfect spontaneity is therefore only a sequel to, and another form of this further fact: absolute equality in the external conditions of struggle.
It is true that this perfect spontaneity, [i.e., equality of opportunity] is nowhere encountered as a fact realised in practice. There is no society where it exists in pure form. If the institution of class corresponds to the natural distribution of abilities, it nevertheless does so only approximately. Indeed, heredity never acts with such precise accuracy that even where it meets conditions most favourable for its influence, children are the exact replica of their parents. Consequently cases occur where the individual is not attuned to the functions that are attributed to him. Such disharmonies become more frequent as society develops. Thanks to the persistence of certain prejudices, a certain favouritism is attached to some individuals unrelated to their merits.
Even if no trace of all these past biases remains, the hereditary transmission of wealth suffices to render very unequal the external conditions for the struggle, since it gives to some the benefit of advantages that do not necessarily correspond to their personal value. Society [should] strive to reduce the inequality that comes from the fact that rich and poor exist by birth by helping in various ways those placed in too disadvantageous a situation, and by assisting them to move out of it. Society demonstrates in this way that it feels itself obliged to make room for all the deserving, and that it recognises as unjust an inferiority that is personally not merited. But what manifests even more clearly this tendency is the belief, nowadays very widespread, that equality between citizens is becoming ever greater, and that it is right that this should continue to grow. Any external inequality compromises organic solidarity.
If societies attempt—and they should attempt—to eliminate external inequalities as much as possible, it is not only because the undertaking is a noble one, but because they cannot continue to be sustained unless all their constituent parts are solidly linked, and solidarity is only possible on this condition. Thus we may predict that this matter of doing justice will become still more absolute as the organised type of society develops. However considerable the progress already realised in this domain may be, it probably gives only a very slight idea of what will be accomplished later.
The task of the most advanced societies may therefore be said to be a mission for justice. Just as the ideal of lower societies was to create or maintain a common life as intense as possible, in which the individual was engulfed, ours is to inject an even greater equity into our social relationships, in order to ensure the free deployment of all those forces that are socially useful. Because organic solidarity is gradually substituting itself for the solidarity that arises from similarities, it is indispensable that external conditions should be evened out. Just as ancient peoples had above all need of a common faith to live by, we have need of justice.
From “Conclusion”
We may state generally that the characteristic of moral rules is that they enunciate the basic conditions of social solidarity. Law and morality represent the totality of bonds that bind us to one another and to society. . . . We may say that what is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to take account of other people, to regulate his actions by something other than the promptings of his own egoism, and the more numerous and strong these ties are, the more solid is the morality. . . . In reality the duties of the individual to himself are duties to society. . . . For example, there is in every healthy consciousness a very active feeling of respect for human dignity, to which we are obliged to make our behavior conform both in our relationship with ourselves and in our relationship with others. . . we must respect human personality wherever we meet it, that is, within ourselves and within our fellow-beings. . . .
Not only does the division of labor present the character by which we have defined morality; it more and more tends to become the essential condition of social solidarity. As evolution advances, the bonds that attach the individual to his family, to his native soil, to traditions that the past has given to him, to collective practices of the group—all these become loosened. Being more mobile, the individual changes his environment more easily, leaves his people to go and live a more autonomous existence elsewhere, works out for himself his ideas and sentiments. Doubtless all trace of common consciousness does not vanish because of this. At the very least there will always subsist that cult of personality, of individual dignity which, today, is already the unique rallying-point for so many minds. But how little a thing it is when one contemplates the ever increasing extent of social life, and, consequently, of individual consciousness! As the latter becomes more expansive, as the intelligence becomes even better equipped, and activity more varied, for morality to remain unchanged, that is for the individual to bond to the group with a force equal to that of yesterday, the ties that bind him must be reinforced, becoming more numerous. Thus if only those ties were forged that were based on similarities, the disappearance of the segmentary type of society would be accompanied by a steady decline in morality. Man would no longer be held adequately under control. He would no longer feel around and above him that salutary pressure of society that moderates his egoism, making him a moral being. This is what constitutes the moral value of the division of labour. Through it, the individual is once more made aware of his dependence upon society. It is from society that proceed those forces that hold him in check and keep him within bounds. In short, since the division of labour becomes the predominant source of social solidarity, at the same time it becomes the foundation of the moral order.
Kelsey, Mary. 2018. “Comments on the writings of Emile Durkheim: Excerpts from
Suicide.” Unpublished.
Reading Guide for “Excerpts from Suicide” (Emile Durkheim)
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)–a French scholar who introduced sociology as an academic discipline at various universities in France. His approach to sociology stressed the necessity of developing a widely shared sense of commitment to the larger society. Durkheim believed that society had great influence on the character of human beings. In fact, it would be impossible to fully comprehend human behavior without understanding the role of external social forces in shaping human behavior. As a sociological scholar, Durkheim stressed the importance of developing methodologies based on the collection of empirical evidence that would make sociology a “scientific” study of society. Thus, his book Suicide broke new intellectual ground as Durkheim argued that one’s membership within specific social categories could increase or decrease individual risk of suicide.
In a different vein, Durkheim also presented an interpretation of capitalist industrial society that, while not a direct counter to Marxist understandings of modern capitalism, presented a different view as to how industrial society affected its individual members (allowed for specialization), maintained social cohesion (specialization led to interdependence, but the sense of interdependence needed to be developed), and need to be regulated by principles of social justice (creating “legitimate inequality” based on individual differences) for maximum societal satisfaction.
1. Vocabulary associated with Durkheim
types of suicide
egoistic
anomic
altruistic
anomie
social integration
moral regulation
2. Why was Durkheim’s study of suicide a significant step in establishing the relevance of sociology to human behavior?
3. What were the defining characteristics of the three types of suicide: egoistic, anomic and altruistic? What categories of people did Durkheim associate with each of the three types of suicide?
4. What did Durkheim believe to be the underlying force behind egoistic suicide?
5. What did Durkheim mean by the term “anomie”?
6. What did Durkheim believe to be the underlying force behind anomic suicide?
7. Why did he believe that people involved in industry and commerce–particularly the newly rich–were more susceptible to anomie and anomic suicide than other people?
8. What were the dangers Durkheim saw in an overly-materialistic society?
9. What did Durkheim identify as the best source of moral regulation?
10. What did Durkheim mean by his conclusion that suicide can result from “society’s insufficient presence in individuals”?
Some Comments on Durkheim’s Suicide
Mary Kelsey, Ph.D.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was a French scholar who was at the forefront of the development of sociology as an academic discipline. He received his baccalaureate in letters and science and later undertook training in France’s most prestigious teaching academy—the Ecole Normale Superieure. In 1882 he was hired to teach at the Faculty of Letters in Bordeaux, where he taught a class on “social science and pedagogy.” This was the first time that sociology took its place as an intellectual discipline alongside subjects like history, philosophy and economics. In 1902, Durkheim was invited to teach at the Sorbonne (the flagship university of France), where his class on sociology and education became a graduation requirement for future teachers. Thus, while sociology as an academic discipline has largely remained peripheral to American education, the early imprimatur of France’s most respected university gave generations of French students and teachers access to the “sociological imagination.”
Durkheim came from a rabbinical family, (i.e., his father was a rabbi, as was his grandfather, great-grandfather, etc.) and as a teenager he considered pursuing rabbinical training. Durkheim, however, chose a more secular education, but—as we shall see from our brief examination of his writings—he would retain lifelong interest in religion, morality, and the relationship between morality and society. While Durkheim wrote on many subjects, (e.g., sociological methods), we will focus on two examples of his work— Suicide (1897) and The Division of Labor in Society (1893).
The following two readings (on egoistic suicide and anomic suicide) are excerpts taken from Durkheim’s manuscript Suicide. Suicide was a work of paramount sociological significance. The book made a bold attempt to illustrate the influence of social forces on an action (suicide) that is usually considered the most psychologically motivated—and thus the most individualistic—of behaviors. Suicide was also a showcase for his belief in “social facts.” Durkheim believed that societies could be studied empirically through the collection of data (or “social facts”). Empirical study allows the existence and accuracy of social facts to be independently corroborated by other researchers. Thus, Suicide —in addition to demonstrating the power of social forces over individual actions—illustrated how “scientific” principles and methodologies could be applied to the study of social problems.
Durkheim found quantitative (number-based) differences in suicide rates in different countries and among different social groups. In his search to find some common, socially-generated causes of suicide, Durkheim proposed that suicide rates were related to two major social forces—social integration and moral regulation. He then created three categories of suicide related to these two principles.
Durkheim argued that the first category of suicide—what he called “egoistic suicide”—was a consequence of insufficient social integration, (i.e., a sense of inclusion in and commitment to a larger group). His two major examples were the higher suicide rates of Protestants compared to Catholics (and Jews) and the higher suicide rates of widowers and other single men compared to married men. (Durkheim thought that women—given their lesser intellectual potential—were less prone to the kind of intellectual self-absorption that led to egoistic suicide among men.) Durkheim claimed that the major difference between Catholics and Protestants was the “spirit of free inquiry” that marked Protestant faiths. Durkheim asserted that Catholics received their religious credo “ready-made” from their priests, and were thus integrated into a community of religiously like-minded people. Protestants had to make their own interpretations of religious life and create their own relationships with God.
If religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis, but because it is society. What constitutes this society is the existence of a certain number of beliefs and practices common to all the faithful, traditional and thus obligatory. The more numerous and strong these collective states of mind are, the stronger the integration of the religious community, and also the greater its preservative value. The details of dogmas and rites are secondary. The essential thing is that they be capable of supporting a sufficiently intense collective life. And because the Protestant church has less consistency than the others it has less moderating effect upon suicide (Durkheim, Suicide, p. 170).
For Durkheim, the lack of social cohesion found among members of Protestant faiths illustrated the larger principle of the power of social integration.
When society is strongly integrated, it holds individuals under its control, considers them at its service and thus forbids them to dispose willfully of themselves. Accordingly it opposes their evading their duties to it through death. But how could society impose its supremacy upon them when they refuse to accept this subordination as legitimate? It no longer then possesses the requisite authority to retain them in their duty if they wish to desert. . . . So far as they are the admitted masters of their destinies, it is their privilege to end their lives. They, on their part, have no reason to endure life’s sufferings patiently. For they cling to life more resolutely when belonging to a group they love, so as not to betray interests they put before their own. The bond that unites them with the common cause attaches them to life and the lofty goal they envisage prevents their feeling personal troubles so deeply. There is, in short, in a cohesive and animated society a constant interchange of ideas and feelings from all to each and each to all, something like a mutual moral support, which instead of throwing the individual on his own resources, leads him to share in the collective energy and supports his own when exhausted (Pp. 209-10).
Durkheim generalized these conclusions on the necessity of social integration to explain higher suicide rates among members of two other groups—intellectuals and the unmarried. Durkheim argued that intellectuals, (e.g., philosophers, social scientists, legal scholars) like Protestants, became authors of their own thoughts by questioning, even rejecting, widely held assumptions. Without allegiance to a clear ideological framework, intellectuals were at risk of becoming too alone with their thoughts and had few safeguards against the risks of intellectual despair.
In a second case study of egoistic suicide, Durkheim found that marriage provided protection against suicide because marriage integrates its members (or, men specifically) into a larger, common life. Married men—as a general social category—feel a sense of obligation to their families and thus reconsider impulses toward suicide. The larger the family, the more cohesive its members. With the death of a spouse, however, the family unit is shocked. Larger families—having more people to support each other—offer more protection against the despair of loss. In smaller families, the cohesion of the family as a whole can be overwhelmed by the intensity of grief. Moreover, in smaller groups, individuals have more difficulty distinguishing between social expectations and expectations based on self-interest. Referring to this “excessive individualism” as “egoism”, Durkheim classified suicides inspired by insufficient ties to a larger community as “egoistic suicide.”
Just as too little social integration could be suicidogenic, Durkheim suggested that too much social integration could also be perilous to individuals. When people feel too much responsibility to the group or when their individuality means nothing outside of group membership, then they may sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group. Thus, soldiers in battle will knowingly go to their deaths if their action will save others or promote the victory of their side. Durkheim called this suicide “altruistic suicide” to emphasize the extreme nature of the social integration it entails. Other examples of altruistic suicide are found in what Durkheim called “primitive” societies. Here Durkheim argued that individuality is insufficiently valued by the larger society. Thus, there are societies where the elderly commit suicide (or expose themselves to conditions certain to cause death) because they feel they are a burden to others. In other situations, servants may commit suicide after the death of their chief because service to their leader is their sole reason for life. Durkheim worried less about this form of suicide, given its prevalence in “primitive” societies.
The second major principle inspiring suicide is moral regulation. For Durkheim, moral regulations through religion or some commonly shared credo offer direction on how to act. Durkheim used the term “anomie” to describe a state of “normlessness” that can prevail in times of rapid social change, (“norms” refer to the accepted codes of conduct in ordinary life—“normlessness” means an absence of agreed upon rules for social conduct, as well as a sense that one may be above the rules other people are expected to follow). Old rules, old expectations, old ways of doing things are no longer valid. Yet, society has not had time to develop new agreements on new social codes of conduct and social values. People feel confused—they become anxious and may lack the moral strength to see themselves through the upsets or crises they encounter.
The second reading outlines some of the conditions that Durkheim associated with anomic suicide. Durkheim argued that periods of sudden economic change increased people’s propensity to commit anomic suicide. Sudden wealth or sudden poverty overturned life as people know it. Suicide becomes a possible response to the stress of sudden change. In addition to those put in peril by economic fluctuations, Durkheim argued that the higher suicide rates found among the business class were examples of anomic suicide.
Durkheim reflected on the ways in which too much money could make people feel above the laws of social regulation. Too much investment in the pursuit of pleasure could undermine moral regulation. With the decline in the regulatory power of religion, the subservience of the state (government) to the needs of the economy, and the general awe with which people regard wealth, what power could subdue the greed and thrill seeking of the rich? Durkheim argued that the extremely wealthy were at risk of substituting the pleasures of acquisition for moral character. If pleasure from unbridled materialism faded or if the pursuit of new excitements left the wealthy feeling empty, then life could lose all meaning. Lacking the inner resources to find peace within their selves, suicide could become an answer to the spiritual vacuum created by hedonistic excess.
Emile Durkheim
Excerpts from chapters on “Egoistic Suicide” in Suicide, 1951 [1897]. Translated by John Spaulding and George Simpson. New York: Free Press
If one casts a glance at the map of European suicide, it is at once clear that in purely Catholic countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, suicide is very little developed, white it is at its maximum in Protestant countries, in Prussia, Saxony, Denmark. The following averaged compiled by Morselli confirms this first conclusion:
Average of Suicides per Million Inhabitants
Protestant States 190
Mixed States (Protestant & Catholic) 96
Catholic States 58
Greek Catholic States 40
The low proportion of the Greek Catholics cannot be surely attributed to religion, for as their civilization is very different from that of the other European nations, this difference of culture may be the cause of their lesser aptitude. But this is not the case with most Catholic or Protestant societies. To be sure, they are not all on the same intellectual and moral level; yet the resemblances are sufficiently essential to make it possible to ascribe to confessional differences the marked contrast they offer in respect to suicide.
The only essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the second permits free inquiry to a far greater degree than the first. Of course, Catholicism by the very fact that it is an idealistic religion concedes a far greater place to thought and reflection than Greco-Latin polytheism or Hebrew monotheism. It is not restricted to mechanical ceremonies but seeks the control of the conscience.
So it appeals to conscience, and even when demanding blind submission of reason, does so by employing the language of reason. Nonetheless, the Catholic accepts his faith ready made, without scrutiny. He may not even submit it to historical examination since the original texts that serve as its basis are proscribed. A whole hierarchical system of authority is devised, with marvelous ingenuity, to render tradition invariable. All variation is abhorrent to Catholic thought. The Protestant is far more the author of his faith. The Bible is put in his hands and no interpretation is imposed upon him. The very structure of the reformed cult stresses this state of religious individualism. Nowhere but in England is the Protestant clergy a hierarchy; like the worshipers, the priest has no other source but himself and his conscience. He is a more instructed guide than the run of worshipers, but without special authority for fixing dogma. But what best proves that this freedom of inquiry proclaimed by the founders of the Reformation has not remained a Platonic affirmation, is the increasing multiplicity of all sorts of sects so strikingly in contrast with the indivisible unity of the Catholic Church.
We thus reach our first conclusion, that the proclivity of Protestantism for suicide must relate to the spirit of free inquiry that animates this religion. Let us understand this relationship correctly. Free inquiry itself is only the effect of another cause. When it appears, when men, after having long received their ready-made faith from tradition, claim the right to shape it for themselves, this is not because of the intrinsic desirability of free inquiry, for the latter involves as much sorrow as happiness. But it is because men henceforth need this liberty. This very need can have only one cause: the overthrow of traditional beliefs. If they [traditional beliefs] still asserted themselves with equal energy, it would never occur to men to criticize them. If they still had the same authority, men would not demand the right to verify the source of this authority. Reflection develops only if its development becomes imperative, that is, if certain ideas and instinctive sentiments which have hitherto adequately guided conduct are found to have lost their efficacy. Then reflection intervenes to fill the gap that has appeared, but which it has not created. Just as reflection disappears to the extent that thought and action take the form of automatic habits, it awakes only when accepted habits become disorganized. It asserts its rights against public opinion only when the latter loses strength, that is, when it is no longer prevalent to the same extent. If these assertions occur not merely occasionally and as passing crises, but become chronic, if individual consciences keep reaffirming their autonomy, it is because they are constantly subject to conflicting impulses, because a new opinion has not been formed to replace the one no longer existing. If a new system of beliefs were constituted which seemed as indisputable to everyone as the old, no one would think of discussing it any longer. Its discussion would no longer even be permitted, for ideas shared by an entire society draw from this consensus an authority that makes them sacrosanct and raises them above dispute. For them to have become more tolerant, they must first already have become the object of less general . . . assent and been weakened by preliminary controversy. . . .
So if Protestantism concedes a greater freedom to individual thought than Catholicism, it is because it has fewer common beliefs and practices. Now a religious society cannot exist without a collective credo and the more extensive the credo the more unified and strong is the society. For it does not unite men by an exchange and reciprocity of services, a temporal bond of union which permits and even presupposes differences, but which a religious society cannot form. It socializes them in proportion as this body of doctrine is extensive and firm. The more numerous the manners of action and thought of a religious character are, which are accordingly removed from free inquiry, the more the idea of God presents itself in all details of existence, and makes individual wills converge to one identical goal. Inversely, the greater concessions a confessional group makes to individual judgment, the less it dominates lives, the less its cohesion and vitality. We thus reach the conclusion that the superiority of Protestantism with respect to suicide results from its being a less strongly integrated church than the Catholic Church.
The beneficent influence of religion is not due to the special nature of religious conceptions. If religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis, but because it is society. What constitutes this society is the existence of a certain number of beliefs and practices common to all the faithful, traditional and thus obligatory. The more numerous and strong these collective states of mind are, the stronger the integration of the religious community, and also the greater its preservative value. The details of dogmas and rites are secondary. The essential thing is that they be capable of supporting a sufficiently intense collective life. And because the Protestant church has less consistency than the others it has less moderating effect upon suicide.
So we reach the general conclusion: suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part.
But society cannot disintegrate without the individual simultaneously detaching himself from social life, without his own goals becoming preponderant over those of the community. . . . The more weakened the groups to which he belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests. If we agree to call this state egoism, in which the individual ego asserts itself to excess in the face of the social ego and at its expense, we may call egoistic the special type of suicide springing from excessive individualism.
But how can suicide have such an origin?
First of all, it can be said that, as collective force is one of the obstacles best calculated to restrain suicide, its weakening involves a development of suicide. When society is strongly integrated, it holds individuals under its control, considers them at its service and thus forbids them to dispose willfully of themselves. Accordingly it opposes their evading their duties to it through death. But how could society impose its supremacy upon them when they refuse to accept this subordination as legitimate? It no longer then possesses the requisite authority to retain them in their duty if they wish to desert; and conscious of its own weakness, it even recognizes their right to do freely what it can no longer prevent. So far as they are the admitted masters of their destinies, it is their privilege to end their lives. They, on their part, have no reason to endure life’s sufferings patiently. For they cling to life more resolutely when belonging to a group they love, so as not to betray interests they put before their own. The bond that unites them with the common cause attaches them to life and the lofty goal they envisage prevents their feeling personal troubles so deeply. There is, in short, in a cohesive and animated society a constant interchange of ideas and feelings from all to each and each to all, something like a mutual moral support, which instead of throwing the individual on his own resources, leads him to share in the collective energy and supports his own when exhausted.
But these reasons are purely secondary. Excessive individualism not only results in favoring the action of suicidogenic causes, but it is itself such a cause. It not only frees man’s inclination to do away with himself from a protective obstacle, but creates this inclination out of whole cloth and thus gives birth to a special suicide which bears its mark. This must be clearly understood for this is what constitutes the special character of the type of suicide just distinguished and justifies the name we have given it. What is there then in individualism that explains this result? . . .
A whole range of functions concern only the individual; these are the ones indispensable for physical life. Since they are made for this purpose only, they are perfected by its attainment. In everything concerning them, therefore, man can act reasonably without thought of transcendental purposes. These functions serve by merely serving him. In so far as he has no other needs, he is therefore self-sufficient and can live happily with no other objective than living. This is not the case however, with the civilized adult. He has many ideas, feelings and practices unrelated to organic needs. The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supra-physical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment. The influence of society is what has aroused in us the sentiments of sympathy and solidarity drawing us toward others; it is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions. To play our social role we have striven to extend our intelligence and it is still society that has supplied us with tolls for this development by transmitting to us its trust fund of knowledge. . . .
If, in other words, as has often been said, man is double, that is because social man superimposes himself upon physical man. Social man necessarily presupposes a society which he expresses and serves. If this dissolves, if we no longer feel it in existence and action about and above us, whatever is social in us is deprived of all objective foundation. All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action. Yet this social man is the essence of civilized man; he is the masterpiece of existence. Thus we are bereft of reasons for existence’ for the only life to which we could cling no longer corresponds to anything actual; the only existence still based upon reality no longer meets our needs. Because we have been initiated into a higher existence, the one which satisfies an animal or a child can satisfy us no more and the other itself fades and leaves us helpless. So there is nothing more for our efforts to lay hold of, and we feel them lose themselves in emptiness.
. . . . This detachment occurs not only in single individuals. One of the constitutive elements of every national temperament consists of a certain way of estimating the value of existence. There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual in incompetent. The latter knows nothing but himself and his own little horizon; thus his experience is too limited to serve as a basis for a general appraisal. He may indeed consider his own life to be aimless; he can say nothing applicable to others. On the contrary, society may generalize its own feeling as to itself, its state of health or lack of health. For individuals share too deeply in the life of society for it to be diseased without their suffering infection. What it suffers they necessarily suffer. Because it is the whole, its ills are communicated to its parts. Hence it cannot disintegrate without awareness that the regular conditions of general existence are equally disturbed. Because society is the end on which our better selves depend, it cannot feel us escaping it without a simultaneous realization that our activity is purposeless. Since we are its handiwork, society cannot be conscious of its own decadence without the feeling that henceforth this work is of no value. Thence we are formed currents of depression and disillusionment emanating from no particular individual but expressing society’s state of disintegration. They reflect the relaxation of social bonds, a sort of collective asthenia, or social malaise, just as individual sadness, when chronic in its way reflects the poor organic state of the individual. . . . Thus, at the very moment that, with excessive zeal, he frees himself from the social environment, he still submits to its influence. However individualized a man may be, there is always something collective remaining–the very depression and melancholy resulting from this same exaggerated individualism. He effects communion through sadness when he no longer has anything else with which to achieve it.
Hence this type of suicide well deserves the name we have given it. Egoism is not merely a contributing factor in it; it is its generating cause. In this case the bond attaching man to life relaxes because that attaching him to society is itself slack. The incidents of private life which seem the direct inspiration of suicide and are considered its determining causes are in reality only incidental causes. The individual yields to the slightest shock of circumstance because the state of society has made him a ready prey to suicide.
Emile Durkheim
Excerpts from chapter on “Anomic Suicide” in Suicide, 1951 [1897]. Translated by John Spaulding and George Simpson. New York: Free Press.
No living being can be happy or even exist unless his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his means. In other words, if his needs require more than can be granted, or even merely something of a different sort, they will be under continual friction and can only function painfully. Movements incapable of production without pain tend not to be reproduced. Unsatisfied tendencies atrophy, and as the impulse to live is merely the result of all the rest, it is bound to weaken as the others relax.
In the animal, at least in a normal condition, this equilibrium is established with automatic spontaneity because the animal depends on purely material conditions. All the organism needs is that the supplies of substance and energy constantly employed in the vital process should be periodically renewed by equivalent quantities; that replacement be equivalent to use. When the void created by existence in its own resources is filled, the animal, satisfied, asks nothing further. Its power of reflection is not sufficiently developed to imagine other ends than those implicit in its physical nature. . . .
This is not the case with man, because most of his needs are not dependent on his body or not to the same degree. Strictly speaking, we may consider that the quantity of material supplies necessary to the physical maintenance of a human life is subject to computation, though this be less exact than in the preceding case and a wider margin left for the free combinations of the will; for beyond the indispensable minimum which satisfies nature when instinctive, a more awakened reflection suggests better conditions, seemingly desirable ends craving fulfillment. Such appetites, however, admittedly sooner or later reach a limit which they cannot pass. But how determine the quantity of well-being, comfort or luxury legitimately to be craved by a human being? Nothing appears in man’s organic nor in his psychological constitution which sets a limit to such tendencies. The functioning of individual life does not require them to cease at one point rather than at another; the proof being that they have constantly increased since the beginnings of history receiving more and more complete satisfaction, yet with no weakening of average health. Above all, how establish their proper variation with different conditions of life, occupation, relative importance of services, etc.? In no society are they equally satisfied in the different stages of the social hierarchy. Yet human nature is substantially the same among all men, in its essential qualities. It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
But if nothing external can restrain this capacity, it can only be a source of torment to itself. Unlimited desires are insatiable by definition and insatiability is rightly considered a sign of morbidity. Being unlimited, they constantly and infinitely surpass the means at their command; they cannot be quenched. Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture. . . . All man’s pleasure in acting, moving and exerting himself implies the sense that his efforts are not in vain and that by walking he has advanced. However, one does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or—which is the same thing—when his goal is infinity. Since the distance between us and it is always the same, whatever road we take, we might as well have made the motions without progress from the spot. Even our glances behind and our feeling of pride at the distance covered can cause only deceptive satisfaction, since the remaining distance is not proportionately reduced. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness. . . . The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs. . . .
To achieve any other result, the passions first must be limited. Only then can they be harmonized with the faculties and satisfied. But since the individual has no way of limiting them, this must be done by some force exterior to him. A regulative force must play the same role for moral needs which the organism plays for physical needs. This means that the force can only be moral. . . . Physical restraints would be ineffective; hearts cannot be touched by physio-chemical forces. So far as the appetites are not automatically restrained by physiological mechanism, they can be halted only by a limit that they recognize as just. Men would never consent to restrict their desires if they felt justified in passing the assigned limit. But, for reasons given above, they cannot assign themselves this law of justice. So they must receive it from an authority which they respect, to which they yield spontaneously. Either directly and as a whole, or through the agency of one of its organs, society alone can play this moderating role; for it is the only moral power superior to the individual, the authority of which he accepts. It alone has the power necessary to stipulate law and to set the point beyond which the passions must not go. Finally, it alone can estimate the reward to be prospectively offered to every class of human functionary, in the name of the common interest.
As a matter of fact, at every moment of history there is a dim perception, in the moral consciousness of societies, of the respective value of different social services, the relative reward due to each, and the consequent degree of comfort appropriate on the average to workers in each occupation. The different functions are graded in public opinion and a certain coefficient of well-being assigned to each, according to its place in the hierarchy. According to accepted ideas, for example, a certain way of living is considered the upper limit to which a workman may aspire in his efforts to improve his existence, and there is another limit below which he is not willingly permitted to fall unless he has seriously demeaned himself. Both differ for city and country workers, for the domestic servant and the day-laborer, for the business clerk and the official, etc. Likewise the man of wealth is reproved if he lives the life of a poor man, but also if he seeks the refinements of luxury overmuch. Economists may protest in vain; public feeling will always be scandalized if an individual spends too much wealth for wholly superfluous use, and it even seems that this severity relaxes only in times of moral disturbance. A genuine regimen exists, therefore, although not always legally formulated, which fixes with relative precision the maximum degree of ease of living to which each social class may legitimately aspire. However, there is nothing immutable about such a scale. It changes with the increase or decrease of collective revenue and the changes occurring in the moral ideal of society. Thus what appears luxury to one period no longer does so to another; and the well-being which for long periods was granted to a class only by exception and supererogation, finally appears strictly necessary and equitable.
Under this pressure, each in his sphere vaguely realizes the extreme limit set to his ambitions and aspires to nothing beyond. At least if he respects regulations and is docile to collective authority, that is, has a wholesome moral constitution, he feels that it is not well to ask more. Thus, an end and goal are set to the passions. Truly, there is nothing rigid nor absolute about such determination. The economic ideal assigned each class of citizens is itself confined to certain limits, within which the desires have free range. But it is not infinite. This relative limitation and the moderation it involves make men contented with their lot while stimulating them moderately to improve it; and this average contentment causes the feeling of calm, active happiness, the pleasure in existing and living which characterizes health for societies as well as for individuals. Each person is then at least, generally speaking, in harmony with his condition, and desires only what he may legitimately hope for as the normal reward of his activity. Besides, this does not condemn man to a sort of immobility. He may seek to give beauty to his life; but his attempts in this direction may fail without causing him to despair. For, loving what he has and not fixing his desire solely on what he lacks, his wishes and hopes may fail of what he has happened to aspire to, without his being wholly destitute. He has the essentials. The equilibrium of his happiness is secure because it is defined, and a few mishaps cannot disconcert him.
But it would be of little use for everyone to recognize the justice of the hierarchy of functions established by public opinion, if he did not also consider the distribution of these functions just. The workman is not in harmony with his social position if he is not convinced that he has his deserts. If he feels justified in occupying another, what he has would not satisfy him. So it is not enough for the average level of needs for each social condition to be regulated by public opinion, but another, more precise rule, must fix the way in which these conditions are open to individuals. There is no society in which such regulation does not exist. It varies with times and places. Once it regarded birth as the almost exclusive principle of social classification; today it recognizes no other inherent inequality than hereditary fortune and merit. But in all these various forms its object is unchanged. It is also only possible, everywhere, as a restriction upon individuals imposed by superior authority, that is, by collective authority. For it can be established only by requiring of one or another group of men, usually of all, sacrifices and concession in the name of the public interest.
Some, to be sure, have thought that this moral pressure would become unnecessary if men’s economic circumstances were only no longer determined by heredity. If inheritance were abolished, the argument runs, if everyone began life with equal resources and if the competitive struggle were fought out on a basis of perfect equality, no one could think its results unjust. Each would instinctively feel that things are as they should be.
Truly, the nearer this ideal equality were approached, the less social restraint will be necessary. But it is only a matter of degree. One sort of heredity will always exist, that of natural talent. Intelligence, taste, scientific, artistic, literary or industrial ability, courage and manual dexterity are gifts received by each of us at birth, as the heir to wealth receives his capital or as the nobleman formerly received his title and function. A moral discipline will therefore still be required to make those less favored by nature accept the lesser advantages which they owe to the chance of birth. Shall it be demanded that all have an equal share and that no advantage be given those more useful and deserving? But then there would have to be a discipline far stronger to make these accept a treatment merely equal to that of the mediocre and incapable.
But like the one first mentioned, this discipline can be useful only if considered just by the peoples subject to it. When it is maintained only by custom and force, peace and harmony are illusory; the spirit of unrest and discontent are latent; appetites superficially restrained are ready to revolt. This happened in Rome and Greece when the faiths underlying the old organization of the patrician and plebeians were shaken, and in our modern societies when aristocratic prejudices began to lose their old ascendancy. But this state of upheaval is exceptional; it occurs only when society is passing through some abnormal crisis. In normal conditions the collective order is regarded as just by the great majority of persons. Therefore, when we say that an authority is necessary to impose this order on individuals, we certainly do not mean that violence is the only means of establishing it. Since this regulation is meant to restrain individual passions, it must come from a power which dominates individuals; but this power must also be obeyed through respect, not fear.
It is not true, then, that human activity can be released from all restraint. Nothing in the world can enjoy such a privilege. Man’s characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body’s yoke, but is subject to that of society.
But when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable or exercising this influence; thence come the sudden rises in the curve of suicides which we have pointed out above.
In the case of economic disasters, indeed, something like a declassification occurs which suddenly casts certain individuals into a lower state than their previous ones. Then they must reduce their requirements, restrain their needs, learn greater self-control. All the advantages of social influence are lost so far as they are concerned; their moral education has to be recommenced. But society cannot adjust them instantaneously to this new life and teach them to practice the increased self-repression to which they are unaccustomed. So they are not adjusted to the condition forced on them, and its very prospect is intolerable; hence the suffering which detaches them from a reduced existence even before they have made trial of it.
It is the same if the source of the crisis is an abrupt growth of power and wealth. Then, truly, as the conditions of life are changed, the standard according to which needs were regulated can no longer remain the same; for it varies with social resources, since it largely determines the share of each class of producers. The scale is upset; but a new scale cannot be immediately improvised. Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things. So long as the social forces thus freed have not regained equilibrium, their respective values are unknown and so all regulation is lacking for a time. The limits are unknown between the possible and the impossible, what is just and what is unjust, legitimate claims and hopes and those which are immoderate. Consequently, there is no restraint upon aspirations. If the disturbance is profound, it affects even the principles controlling the distribution of men among various occupations. Since the relations between various parts of society are necessarily modified, the ideas expressing these relations must change. Some particular class especially favored by the crisis is no longer resigned to its former lot, and on the other hand, the example of its greater good fortune arouses all sorts of jealousy below and about it. Appetites, not being controlled by a public opinion become disoriented, no longer recognize the limits proper to them. . . . With increased prosperity desires increase. At the very moment when traditional rules have lost their authority, the richer prize offered these appetites stimulates them and make them more exigent and impatient of control. The state of de-regulation or anomie is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining.
But then their very demands make fulfillment impossible. Overweening ambition always exceeds the results obtained, great as they may be, since there is no warning to pause here. Nothing gives satisfaction and all this agitation is uninterruptedly maintained without appeasement. Above all, since this race for an unattainable goal can give no other pleasure but that of the race itself, if it is one, once it is interrupted the participants are left empty-handed. At the same time the struggle grows more violent and painful, both from being less controlled and because competition is greater. All classes contend among themselves because no established classification any longer exists. Effort grows, just when it becomes less productive. How could the desire to live not be weakened under such conditions?
This explanation is confirmed by the remarkable immunity of poor countries. Poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraint in itself. No matter how one acts, desires have to depend upon resources to some extent; actual possessions are partly the criterion of those aspired to. So the less one has the less he is tempted to extend the range of his needs indefinitely. Lack of power, compelling moderation, accustoms men to it, while nothing excites envy if no one has superfluity. Wealth, on the other hand, by the power it bestows, deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only. Reducing the resistance we encounter from objects, it suggests the possibility of unlimited success against them. The less limited one feels, the more intolerable all limitation appears. Not without reason, therefore, have so many religions dwelt on the advantages and moral value of poverty. It is actually the best school for teaching self-restraint. Forcing us to constant self-discipline, it prepares us to accept collective discipline with equanimity, while wealth, exalting the individual, may always arouse the spirit of rebellion which is the very source of immorality. This, of course, is no reason why humanity should not improve its material condition. But though the moral danger involved in every growth of prosperity is not irremediable, it should not be forgotten.
If anomie never appeared except, as in the above instances, in intermittent spurts and acute crisis, it might cause the social suicide rate to vary from time to time, but it would not be a regular, constant factor. In one sphere of social life, however—the sphere of trade and industry—it is actually in a chronic state.
For a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation. Until very recently, it was the function of a whole system of moral forces to exert this discipline. First, the influence of religion was felt alike by workers and masters, the poor and the rich. It consoled the former and taught them contentment with their lot by informing them of the providential nature of the social order, that the share of each class was assigned by God himself, and by holding out the hope for just compensation in a world to come in return for the inequalities of this world. It governed the latter, recalling that worldly interests are no man’s entire lot, that they must be subordinate to other and higher interests, and that they should therefore not be pursued without rule or measure. Temporal power, in turn, restrained the scope of economic functions by its supremacy over them and by the relatively subordinate role it assigned them. Finally, within the business world proper, the occupational groups by regulating salaries, the price of products and production itself, indirectly fixed the average level of income on which needs are partially based by the very force of circumstances. However, we do not mean to propose this organization as a model. Clearly it would be inadequate to existing societies without great changes. What we stress is its existence, the fact of its useful influence, and that nothing today has come to take its place.
Actually, religion has lost most of its power. And government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant. The most opposite schools, orthodox economists and extreme socialists, unite to reduce government of the role of a more or less passive intermediary among the various social functions. The former wish to make it simply the guardian of individual contracts; the latter leave it the task of doing the collective bookkeeping, that is, of recording the demands of consumers, transmitting them to producers, inventorying the total revenue and distributing it according to a fixed formula. But both refuse it any power to subordinate other social organs to itself and to make them converge toward one dominant aim. On both sides nations are declared to have the single or chief purpose of achieving industrial prosperity; such is the implication of the dogma of economic materialism, the basis of both apparently opposed systems. And as these theories merely express the state of opinion, industry, instead of being still regarded as a means to an end transcending itself, has become the supreme end of individuals and societies alike. Thereupon the appetites thus excited have become freed of any limiting authority. By sanctifying them, so to speak, this apotheosis of well-being has placed them above all human law. Their restraint seems like a sort of sacrilege. For this reason, even the purely utilitarian regulation of them exercised by the industrial world itself through the medium of occupational groups has been unable to persist. Ultimately, this liberation of desires has been made worse by the very development of industry and the almost infinite extension of the market. So long as the producer could gain his profits only in his immediate neighborhood, the restricted amount of possible gain could not much overexcite ambition. Now that he may assume to have almost the entire world as his customer, how could passions accept their former confinement in the face of such limitless prospects?
Such is the source of the excitement predominating in this part of society, and which has thence extended to the other parts. There, the state of crisis and anomie is constant and, so to speak, normal. From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned, but so too is possibility abandoned when it in turn becomes reality. A thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once known. Henceforth one has no strength to endure the least reverse. The whole fever subsides and the sterility of all the tumult is apparent, and it is seen that all these new sensations in their infinite quantity cannot form a solid foundation of happiness to support one during days of trial. The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present’s afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopping in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. Weariness alone, moreover, is enough to bring disillusionment, for he cannot in the end escape the futility of an endless pursuit.
We may even wonder if this moral state is not principally what makes economic catastrophes of our day so fertile in suicides. In societies where a man is subjected to a healthy discipline, he submits more readily to the blows of chance. The necessary effort for sustaining a little more discomfort costs him relatively little, since he is used to discomfort and constraint. But when every constraint is hateful in itself, how can closer constraint not seem intolerable. There is no tendency to resignation in the feverish impatience of men’s lives. When there is no other aim but to outstrip constantly the point arrived at, how painful to be thrown back! Now this very lack of organization characterizing our economic condition throws the door wide to every sort of adventure. Since imagination is hungry for novelty, and ungoverned, it gropes at random. Setbacks necessarily increase with risks and thus crises multiply, just when they are becoming more destructive.
Yet these dispositions are so inbred that society has grown to accept them and is accustomed to think them normal. It is everlastingly repeated that it is man’s nature to be eternally dissatisfied, constantly to advance, without relief or rest, toward an indefinite goal. The longing for infinity is daily represented as a mark of moral distinction, whereas it can only appear within unregulated consciences which elevate to a rule to lack of rule from which they suffer. The doctrine of the most ruthless and swift progress has become an article of faith. But other theories appear parallel with those praising the advantages of instability, which, generalizing the situation that gives them birth, declare life evil, claim that it is richer in grief than in pleasure and that it attracts men only by false claims. Since this disorder is greatest in the economic world, it has most victims there.
Industrial and commercial functions are really among the occupations which furnish the greatest number of suicides. Almost on a level with the liberal professions, they sometimes surpass them; they are especially more afflicted than agriculture, where the old regulative forces still make their appearance felt most and where the fever of business has least penetrated. Here is best recalled what was once the general constitution of the economic order. And the divergence would be yet greater if, among the suicides of industry, employers were distinguished from workmen, for the former are probably most stricken by the state of anomie. The enormous rate of those with independent means (720 per million) sufficiently shows that the possessors of most comfort suffer most. Everything that enforces subordination attenuates the effects of this state. At least the horizon of the lower classes is limited by those above them, and for this same reason their desires are more modest. Those who have only empty space above them are almost inevitably lost in it, if no force restrains them.
Anomie, therefore, is a regular and specific factor in suicide in our modern societies; one of the springs from which the annual contingent feeds. So we have here a new type to distinguish from others. It differs from them in its dependence, not on the way in which individuals are attached to society, but on how it regulates them. Egoisitic suicide results from man’s no longer finding a basis for existence in life; altruistic suicide, because this basis for existence appears to man situated beyond life itself. The third sort of suicide, the existence of which has just been shown, results from man’s activities lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings. By virtue of its origin we shall assign this last variety the name of anomic suicide.
Certainly, this and egoistic suicide have kindred ties. Both spring from society’s insufficient presence in individuals. But the sphere of its absence is not the same in both cases. In egoistic suicide it is deficient in truly collective activity, thus depriving the latter of object and meaning. In anomic suicide, society’s influence is lacking in the basically individual passions, thus leaving them without a check-rein. In spite of their relationship, therefore, the two types are independent of each other. We may offer society everything social in us, and still be unable to control our desires; one may live in an anomic state without being egoistic, and vice versa. These two sorts of suicide therefore do not draw their chief recruits from the same social environments; one has its principal field among intellectual careers, the world of thought—the other, the industrial or commercial world
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